The GBIF Science Committee met in Glasgow where they awarded prizes and developed the Ebbe Nielsen Challenge. CSIRO's Tony Rees was named the 2014 Ebbe Nielsen Prize winner. Young Researcher Awards were given to Vijay Barve and Caoimhe Marshall. The GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge will foster innovation using GBIF data and have cash prizes. The committee discussed challenges around data types from sources like DNA sequences and literature, as well as data quality and coverage issues.

1. GBIF Science Committee
Elizabeth Arnaud Guy Cochrane Mark Costello Jean Ganglo
Rod Page Arturo Ariño Plana Kathy Willis ex officio

2. Summary of activities
• Meeting at Glasgow
• Awarding prizes
• Developing the Ebbe Nielsen Challenge
• Collaboration with GBIF Secretariat
– Recruitment of Programme Officers
– Science Symposium

3. Science Symposium
Tim Hirsch
Kyle Copas

4. CSIRO’s Tony Rees named 2014 Ebbe
Nielsen Prize winner

5. Young Researcher Awards
Vijay Barve (India)
Social networks as data sources
Caoimhe Marshall (Ireland)
Measuring sampling effort

6. GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge
• Challenge to foster innovation in biodiversity
informatics
• Must use GBIF-mediated data
• Submission must be open source (or at least
openly accessible)
• Judged by science committee

7. Prize Grant
Money
Output
Challenge

8. Prizes!
• Round 1 (five semifinalists) (SC meeting)
– €1,000
• Round 2 (GB22)
– €20,000 first prize
– €5,000 second prize

9. Challenges of a different sort…

10. Data types

11. DNA sequences from EMBL

12. Betula nana L.
GBIF has 597,148
occurrences of this species…
…but 551,919 occurrences
from shotgun genome
sequencing a single plant in
Scotland.

13. Data sources

14. Biodiversity literature

15. http://www.journalmap.org

16. Data quality
(fitness for use)

17. doi:10.1017/S0030605313001427
Wikipedia CC BY-SA

18. Chameleons in Africa
(usability for Red List-style assessment)
7%

19. http://iphylo.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/guest-post-response-to-discussion-on.html
(22 comments)

20. What happened?
• Some major GBIF providers don’t release
georeferenced records
• Some museum collections used by expert are not
contributing to GBIF
• GBIF taxonomy is out of date
• Expert-curated data not available to GBIF - why?

21. The year ahead…
• Ebbe Nielsen Challenge
• Working with the new Programme Officers
• Issues of data type, scope, coverage, quality,
and annotation